Ms Niamh Davenport:

Our education and awareness drive has been successful in moving fraudsters from impersonating the bank text messages. That is why 80% of the text messages are now impersonating what we refer to as non-banks. They are impersonating parcel delivery companies and those kinds of thing. Companies not from our sector have come to ask us what they are doing wrong. We tell them not to include a link and to change their communications. We need to make life as easy as possible for people so we should use text messages but we tell companies to get people to open their app. We tell them not to include links in messages. We feel strongly that education and awareness are important to understand how communications are sent and how people are contacted.

It is very important to understand how communications go out there and how people will be contacted. If people can understand what those communications should look like, they will be better armed to protect themselves.